Inside a former eyeglass store on the corner of Powell and O’Farrell, a 10-minute walk from Anthropic’s headquarters on Market Street, and surrounded by the hollowed out storefronts that line Union Square’s once-bustling downtown commercial district, a group of artists are intently installing the results of a prompt issued three weeks ago by Ash Herr, the founder and one-woman whirlwind behind a gallery called “the intersection of art and technology,” or TIAT. Herr’s prompt: “Can Chinamaxxing still save us?”
The theme is a riff on on the online trend that flooded the internet earlier this year, in which young Americans trade iced lattes for hot tea, celebrate the Lunar New Year and attempt to become Chinese, in the hopes of temporarily escaping that sinking feeling that the things that the U.S. was once known for — technological innovation, big infrastructure projects, manufacturing, dominating the world — have been usurped by China.
Chinamaxxing had been around for enough time, said Herr, to generate more serious conversations about what it all meant. “It was,” she said. “A rich, dense playground.”…